I have successfully (well, almost, otherwise I wouldn't ask) installed the 1.11.356 version on ubuntu 9.04, using mencoder 1.0~rc3+svn20090804-0jaunty1. It seems that the only successful transcoding is performed by mencoder (vlc is not working, but I wasn't interested anyway).

The problem seems to be with youtube - I am seeing in the logs that the PS3MS runs mencoder having the youtube page itself as argument, like:

victor@victor-laptop:~/pms-linux-1.11.356$ mencoder http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ98NE84vQA -prefer-ipv4 -nocache -quiet -oac lavc -of lavf -lavfopts format=dvd -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=4096:threads=2:acodec=ac3:abitrate=128 -ofps 24000/1001 -o /tmp/javaps3media/mencoder1252962499709MEncoder SVN-r29476-Ubuntu-RVM (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer TeamResolving www.youtube.com for AF_INET...Connecting to server www.youtube.com[209.85.129.102]: 80...Cache size set to 0 KBytessuccess: format: 0 data: 0x0 - 0x0Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!Stream not seekable!============ Sorry, this file format is not recognized/supported ================ If this file is an AVI, ASF or MPEG stream, please contact the author! ===Cannot open demuxer.

For URLs that are directly video streams (not webpages) it works flawlessly - even for those great HD streams from Alaska.. Am I missing something regarding youtube support? Is mencoder expected to understand youtube web pages and extract video from them? If so, how, as I'm running the latest mencoder build?